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Comment by aaronblohowiak | Hacker News Reader

your post implies digg isn't a startup.

Digg isn't a startup. It started in 2004 and has been mature for about 5 years. They are a business now. And a big one at that.

For the 40m investment, I wonder how much profit they make. They seem to have a very large staff.

I have questions about what they're doing with all that staff, especially now that it's become apparent that Reddit is doing similar (if not larger) numbers with a handful of guys (literally, countable on one hand).

Evidently Digg is better at the monetization game than Reddit has been, so more sales staff I can understand... but devs?

I can understand that Digg needs more people than Reddit (even though their traffic numbers are about the same) but TEN TIMES more people? That's just not sensible. I'm sure Digg can make a nice profit without further growth if they just got rid of about half their staff.

I wonder if its easier to get funding (and later position yourself to get sold out), if you show that you have quite a few people working for you.

Personally I have no idea nor do I see any reason for that many people working for digg, but my understanding is that Digg (or rather Kevin Rose) has always been about having the perception of big without actually being that big.

Fake it until you break it?

You know what's even better? Having the perception that you are big but without actually hiring 100 fucking people to do it. I mean if that's what you need to impress investors at a cocktail party, you're a pretty sad entrepreneur.

I agree, I don't think highly of kevin as an entrepreneur.

Tell that to investors. I see their position as precarious and they haven't IPO'd or been acquired. They have a lot of staff and have longevity, but I don't think that is enough for them to stop being a startup.

These days, "startup" can mean pretty much anything smaller than a Fortune 500 company...

Being a startup isn't about the company, it's about the product. There are startup teams at fortune 500 companies. A startup company is a company with one new product in development.

Personally, I don't consider Digg a startup.

That depends on how you define your terms. I'm not sure a company that has been around 6 years and has ~100 staff can be called a startup any more. On the other hand, I'm not sure a company that still survives more on the wishful thinking of investors than on the money it brings in after 6 years can be called a business, either, and certainly I wouldn't call it either big or mature. I'm honestly not sure what I would call that sort of organisation, though if I were an investor, I suspect the word "liability" would feature somewhere.

> I'm not sure a company that still survives more on the wishful thinking of investors

Unless you are owned by a larger company that runs you at a loss as part of their strategy. Or stragedy.

You call it a small business.

Companies like Etsy insist they are still startups, too - five years, $55 million dollars in funding, tens of millions in revenue, and 130 employees later. I don't buy it, either. They are an established business, but routinely use this 'startup' label as an excuse.

So, why not just pay to Cassandra's authors for a quick fix? Because they can't?

because in part they are the cassandra authors, I'd say. They have been contributing code to cassandra for quite a while.

That is it! So the problem seems to be a complex one. Some part of it I think is an ordinary Java issues - what happens when there is not enough memory, and system start use swap, what happens when a connection rate is too fast while system is doing a heavy IO? What happens during recovery of network operation or replication failure and so on. The second part is the complexity of the software itself, but not the complexity of the algorithms or tasks - it isn't a rocket science, but added artificial complexity due to all those CrappyFactoryManager().GetSpecialShitFactory().instantiateANewCrap() and so on - seem like no one can comprehend the whole mess itself. In the other hand, this failure probably will cause some improvements or at least more attention to Cassandra project, and everyone who uses it will benefit.

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